Can anybody buy art?
Why buy art?
How to live with an art piece?
What role does it play in our lives?
As a beginner those were the questions I
needed to explore by myself. All my work is
focused on this one idea: the impact of art
on our everyday life. This began when I was
studying interior design and wanted to examine the inﬂuence of space on our personality
and life. Art is closely related to space, most
pieces hanging on walls in a gallery space or
at home. With the Hangart project I was able
to explore those relations.
Arriving in a new ﬁeld, in a new country, Poland, I needed to have my own experiences
and conduct ﬁeld recognition.

Who buys it? Based on what?
Can we skip the gallery step and adopt a
different approach to art?
If today you decided to get an art piece, a
canvas for your interior for instance, what
would you do? Where would you go? The
answer can be difﬁcult, if you don’t know any
artists or galleries personally.
It is a long process to ﬁnd the galleries offering art you would like.
But what do you like? What price would you
be willing to pay?
All those questions in the end often take you
to the frames department at Ikea, where you
choose something easy and inexpensive. You
may also end up at a ﬂea market or just settle
for a trip souvenir.

An art experience
It began with simple questions:
Who buys art?
Why?
What prices are people prepared to pay?
What inﬂuence can an art piece have in our
everyday life?
All Hangart projects were steps in these
explorations, each project stemming from a
question and becoming a possible answer.
It started with the hangart.pl website.
Contrary to most collectors, when regular
people buy art, they usually do it to hang it in
their interiors.

On the other side you have young artists, not
yet represented by galleries, creating a lot,
with no access to those potential clients.
Hangart.pl positioned itself as a link between
domestic interiors and artists.
We offered a database of canvases from
young polish artists that were accessible to
people with their own criteria for choosing.
Size, theme, colors.
My interior design studies inﬂuenced this approach a lot. It was also meant for decorators
to have quick access to a regularly updated
database, a large panel of art pieces, from
small to big, cheap to expensive.

Hangart Concept Shows
One of the options we explore to facilitate
this path of acquiring art are the Hangart
Shows based on A4 works or small canvases for a limited “small” price.
Every artist has a lot of sketches, thoughts,
tiny drawings on scraps of paper, hidden
under the bed or in the corner of their workshop. These raw works have little value to
them, but for me it was a perfect material to
work on in my exploration of the art-interior
link.
It could be the answer, a way for artists to
share their art without the conventions, the
rules of the market - just a link between the
artist and the public.
Can it be considered art?
Can it be sold?
What value does it have?

2010

2011

Artists do not consider it a product, it is only
a private step in their work.
Can anything be sold?
It was really interesting to observe how
artists approach those pieces that are presented with the sole objective of being sold.

We decided to present all the pieces in
identical frames, for the same price and
without visible signatures.
Some were made for the occasion, but
most of them had been left aside, forgotten.
It was a way for me to ask questions about
the public’s approach, to see if people
would make their choices based only on
their private aesthetic.
I have often heard people say: “I don’t know
anything about art, what is good? What
should I buy?”
This is exactly what I fight against: this fake
inconvenience of acquiring an art piece. I
want to teach the public to trust themselves
and their taste.
This first edition was a big success, for the
buyers and the artists alike. The latter had
the opportunity to meet the people interested in their art and get to know them. And
the buyers got their chance to buy, for a really affordable price, a little piece on paper
directly from the artist.
It was such a big success that I made a
second edition, this time with a little bonus
feature: the introduction of small canvases,
also for a low price. A new step in this mutual apprenticeship.

Do you perceive art
differently in a gallery
than home?
The Hangart.pl website offered mostly
canvases of various sizes and styles.
It was hard for the public to imagine how
the little images on the computer screen
would look like in reality. So we decided to
rent a gallery in Warsaw for 2 weeks and
present most of the content of Hangart.pl.
How to present a website content? Twelve
different artists, each with his own style.
We had a very limited budget and many
pieces to present, so we were wondering
how to transmit this home approach and
the new way of looking at and perceiving
art.
With set designer Ula Kuczynska we divided the gallery space into rooms, using
tape glued to the floor to mark the walls.
This arrangement was meant to symbolize
our questions about behavior and perception in a gallery. The artists were told they
could arrange their own space, present
what they wanted in the way they wanted.
Giving freedom was really important to me
as a curator. Throughout this show I wanted to present not only the canvases, but
also the artists’ personalities, to make the
public enter their space, their world.

We brought chairs into each ‘room’ and
printed information on the floor to change
the behavior and movement of the viewers.
Instead of having them stand in front of a
canvas and then move on to the next one,
I wanted to break with this convention and
invite the public to move and act differently: to watch the paintings sitting down
as they would in their homes.
During the opening we changed the usual
arrangement of the gallery’s space to
create a fluent exchange and movement
throughout all the rooms.
Will the public respond to our cues?
The most interesting thing was that the
public instinctively responded to the cues
printed on the floor, never simply cruising
along the walls, but entering the doors (we
used the symbols of architecture plans to
draw doors on the floor) and sitting down
on the chairs, recreating their own private
behavior in the gallery space.

Can we create art shows at home?
After the gallery experience I wanted to try a domestic one.
I organized two exhibitions in an apartment. Breaking the rules
of presentation, we wanted to experiment with a new way of
sharing art. With the same idea of freedom for artists, two exhibitions were created.

(1)

(5)

An apartment has it own codes, in opposition to a gallery space. With rooms
different in shape and size, and with
speciﬁc rules and design, it is hard to
highlight art pieces in a ﬂat as compared to the traditional “white cube”
shape of most gallery rooms. I was
curious how artist would operate in this
kind of space. How would they manage
those requirements?

(2)

The ﬁrst artist to enter this space was
Ilona Blaut. She had total freedom to
present her pieces. She is fascinated
with dogs so she presented a series of
paintings representing her passion.
She invited Magdalena Dukaczewska
so the two could confront their works
as both have very speciﬁc styles. In one
room Ilona presented big paintings of
dogs in movement, while Magdalena
showed small prints and drawings in another. Their approach was conventional,
transforming the domestic space into a
gallery.

The second show was a conceptual
project by a group of young Polish artists who invented a ﬁctional character
called Oskar Karaś. They had a totally
different approach and adapted the
entire space considering each room
individually – from the kitchen to the
bathroom.
(6)

They recreated Oskar’s home by rearranging all the rooms and spaces. It was
an amazing experience and a big success. It offered them the possibility to
push the concept further, to think each
space through, and to adapt and create
art in each of the rooms.

(4)

Floating keys and water installations in
the kitchen, a suspended tent in the living room, live ﬁsh in the bath, clothes
in the closet. This entire conceptual installation was a background to Oskar’s
paintings and personality.
(4)

How can we present Polish
Street-Art scene in a gallery?
The Street Art Doping festival showcased murals in Warsaw for a few years. They wanted to
take a step forward by organizing an exhibition
in a gallery space, presenting Street Art artists.
Our role with Chazme 718 was to select artists
and think of a way to show those art pieces.
It was a problematic offer. How can we present
the Polish street art scene in a gallery?
It seemed like a contradiction to present illegal
art, usually seen in the streets, in an enclosed
space of a gallery. We had a lot to choose from
– 30 artists representing Polish street art,
from hardcore graffiti and abstract canvases
to sculptures. We wanted to present the evolution of those artists, each of whom has been
active on the scene for more than 10 years.

But we also had sculptures from M-city (2), the
political pieces from Forin and the crazy world
of Lump, made of dolls and sculptures. (2)
When choosing the pieces, we wanted to
present the richness of each artist’s work, his
world and his sensibility, all issued from the
same essence. We really wanted to establish
a dialogue between the artists and the public,
to discover together the diversity and the limitless nature of the movement, which cannot be
bound by any certain style.
(1)

That exhibition aimed to show where the Polish street art comes from and where it is going.
The artist KRAC (1), a very active painter in the
streets of Warsaw, made a transparent banner with tags, which we put on the windows
outside to underline that some pieces do not
belong to a gallery space, but also to convey
the essence of the movement: the illegal nickname signatures on city walls. Indoors, we
tried to present the movement’s diversity: from
Nakor’s graffiti canvases, all the way to the active scene of mural painters like Chazme 718,
Sepe, Autone.

(2)

Chazme 718 - “Miasto”

Krik - “Untitled”

Sainer - “Flesz”

Forin “ Obama/Osama”

M-city - Pneumatics objects serie.

Project QUARTER - Warsaw
For the 2012 edition, we wanted to go back outside by devoting an entire city quarter to street
art. We wanted to show it on billboards, in the
shops, in the streets – everywhere we could.
Our main goal was to confront the citizens with
spontaneous art and to share with them our
experience and point of view. We wanted to
make dance, music, performances, painting and
sculptures accessible to everyone.The line-up
was varied, mixing different approaches, techniques, styles and countries to really enrich the
experience of street art for the public.
We had 24 artists from 7 countries in 1 week.

«Art is the place that produces a specific sociability.
It remains to be seen what the status of this is in the
set of «states of encounter» proposed by the city.»
Nicolas Bourriaud - Relational Aesthetics

This billboard was the symbol of this festival , to make the information ﬂuent and updated after each action.
It was placed in the center of the district so the public could knew where to ﬁnd pieces or perfomances.

The festival opened with a dance performance
by Iza Szostak (2) and Mani-Pulsacje. Kuba Twice
Improvise (1) did a musical performance everyday on a pedestrian crossing. Projekt Wawa 2.1
invited people to their workshop (3), where they
could redesign some of the streets of Warsaw
under guidance from architects and designers.
Street art is a very broad term, representing all
actions taking place in the street that have a
direct impact on the public. Illegal action is at
its essence, so organizing a festival with artists
from the movement was a big challenge.
Do we have the right to limit the artists and control their actions?
It was challenging to inspire them to create and,
at the same time, to control and limit their actions, because of legal responsibilities as organizers.
The other question was:
Is it even legitimate to make art in a public
space?
It was the first time an event like that happened
in Warsaw. With â&#x20AC;&#x153;Quarterâ&#x20AC;? we wanted to test the
reactions of the city and the public toward art
actions in a public space.

We discovered a big desire among young people, but at the opposite end there was fear and
rejection from older generations and law enforcement officials, because of very restrictive
laws and rules, which have not been adapted to
the present climate or this type of interventions.
Warsaw is evolving really fast, adapting to her
neighbors, like Berlin or London. Based on this
economic propulsion she is now a living organism. Poland is one of the rare countries not
touched by the economic crisis in Europe. It is
a country focused on itself, on its development
and on taking advantage of all the opportunities
. This rhythm is really impressive. It is a source
of many interesting contrasts and social questions.
We focused on Chmielna Street, one of the few
pedestrian streets in the center of the city. We
chose this street, because of the exposition and
the melting pot of people, generations and history it offers. It is a well-known street in Warsaw,
walked everyday by a lot of people but somehow
forgotten, excluded from any urban plans.

Music performance

(1)

Dance performance

(2)

Workshops

Art installations

(3)

Exhibition
For the festival, we based our headquarters in a gallery space near Chmielna Street. At the end of the
week we held an exhibition summarizing the even,
transcribing and presenting all that happened during
the festival.
This gallery space was our meeting spot, a place to
spend time together. Sharing experiences and building the projects in a friendly atmosphere played a
major role in this festival.
I wanted to continue down this path and preserve
this atmosphere by inviting each of the artists to play
around with the gallery space. Knowing they belong
to the streets with their work, I asked them to underline this fact and play with the contradiction.
It was important for me not to force an exhibition, but
to create a common project just by defining a space
for each of them, to make it cohesive and interesting.
We had 2 days to put a show together, with 18 artists participating and also with works from the public
made during the Project Wawa 2.1 workshops.
All this had to be done in a limited space. We wanted
to preserve each personality, highlight each project
and make it all cohesive. Everyone played along by
creating a piece especially for this exhibition.

Tryone - â&#x20AC;&#x153;Circle Iâ&#x20AC;?

QUARTER - OFF
Is it legitimate to make illegal street art?
This question came up throughout the festival and
required a position from me as a curator. The only
rule I adopted was to stay out of the district with actions that were not approved by city officials.
For me, energy and creativity are rooted in the notion of total freedom, pure action unlimited by anyone’s needs. This is where artists draw their ideas
and personality from - this land, this jungle made of
concrete. The city is their playground. By establishing
rules, we in effect kill this essence.
This ‘off’ part was the most important element of this
festival. Our goal was not to carry out a maximum
number of illegal acts of vandalism. The project was
based on the concept of exchange. By organizing
tours of the city, we wanted to present a new way of
seeing Warsaw, of discovering the city through the
eyes of graffiti artists.
That was the main goal of my invitation: to let them
discover the city and share their experience with us,
so that we, in turn, could absorb their culture.
Br1 (Italy)

We had to limit ourselves to one district but it showed
the possibilities of a new way of communication,
which can bring a lot to the city, its citizens and to
artists from all over the world.

The Wa - “Another Way”

Tryone - “Align with Dry hands”

AS IF THERE WAS NO TOMORROW
PHOTOGRAPHY EXHIBITION
BRATISLAVA
It is a project about a place which creates a
feeling of temporality, place with short past
and unsure future.
It is a place where everything looks like a
movie set built from recycled materials, place
which gives you feeling of something very
ephemeral and short lasting.
But in this place there are living people who
have desire to live a life without constant
questioning, people who are creative, full of
ideas, full of live and passion.
They live their lives in contrast to their surroundings, they live for the moment with great
energy, they live as if there was no
tomorrow.
http://bartpogoda.net/
http://silviapogoda.com/